NZ urges Rudd to rethink on ETS

Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd
is under fire from the left and the right as he struggles to justify his decision to shelve his emissions trading scheme until at least 2013.

New Zealand Prime Minister
John Key
, a conservative, told a conference of company directors on Friday that he hoped Australia would adopt an ETS as soon as possible because New Zealand was committed to starting its scheme on July 1 this year.

Mr Key said he was now under pressure to delay because of Mr Rudd’s backdown. But he said his government had already issued about $NZ1 billion ($796 million) worth of credits for forest owners.

“I am under all this pressure to delay because of what Kevin has done," Mr Key told the Australian Institute of Company Directors conference in Christchurch.

“I really hope that Australia can get to the position we are in . . . because in the end it doesn’t make sense to have the most comprehensive trade agreement, these amazingly permissive investment rules and then turn around and say, ‘We are going to have economic policy dictated by differences in climate change policy’."

Related Quotes

Company Profile

Mr Key’s comments came a day after Mr Rudd’s hand-picked climate change adviser, economist
Ross Garnaut
, warned that China was leading on global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions “in a way that we are not".

Though China has been widely criticised for blocking progress at the Copenhagen climate change summit, Professor Garnaut said the economic giant was taking enormous strides towards a low-emissions economy.

Mr Rudd has cited the disappointing outcome at Copenhagen to justify his claim that Australia should now wait and see what the rest of the world is doing before locking in its ETS.

But the Prime Minister has struggled to reconcile this position with his claim, made before Copenhagen, that it was in Australia’s interests to legislate the scheme before the conference.

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Mitch Hooke argued at the time that the PM’s push to lock in the ETS amounted to a “$114 billion gamble on the outcome of Copenhagen".